HalMorris

• HalMorrisNov 21, 2014, 3:45 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Nar­cis­sis­tic Contrarianism

  The easiest way to filter out 99 percent of this is to ignore anything that has no impact on your life (ie doesn’t pay rent).

  Eh? If I was renting, I think that would have an impact on my life—so maybe this is yet another metaphor I never heard of.

  If everyone was processing reality to the best of their analytical (and other) abilities, and honestly passing on the conclusions they reach then virtuosity at recognizing rational fallacies would go a lot further than I think it actually does; I’m afraid much of what we need is a social understanding of others.

  Just FWIW, Aspergers types, which many I encounter here are self-proclaimed to be, have a chance to do this better than other people, because they have to do consciously what others have no idea that they’re doing. By the way, book recommendation: The Journal of Best Practices by David Finch. Very funny and enlightening, about an Aspergers/​non-Aspergers mixed marriage. My wife and I had a good time reading it.

• HalMorrisNov 21, 2014, 3:30 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Nar­cis­sis­tic Contrarianism

  I’m extremely intellectually compulsive if I do say so perhaps immodestly; just for example, I read a lot of books by people I expect to disagree with, and in fields I start out with no clue about; but I’m trying to get better and better at knowing where to draw the line—and to share some of thoughts on on this in part so they can be criticized.

  With less diligence, you simply stop when you cease interacting with people who can beat your kung fu.

  Well, here I am, still interacting with you. Maybe my kung fu is being beaten, maybe not (by the way, sadly, David Carradine died a few years back in a Bangkok hotel of asphyxiation—at least that’s what Wikipedia says—I looked it up because I had the notion maybe it was very recent. I used to like Kung Fu, but then when Carradine became such an action/​adventure B actor, I was disillusioned—such are the follies of youth).

• HalMorrisNov 21, 2014, 3:15 PM

  6 points

  in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Nar­cis­sis­tic Contrarianism

  I like that—probably a good rule of thumb, although it a stock-picker starts off saying they’re a contrarian, I wouldn’t necessarily stop listening. I’d also be more specific and say that labeled “contrarian” in an approving way by someone I trust might be worth paying attention to.

  But rules of thumb aren’t meant to be so wordy, so I still like yours.

• HalMorrisNov 21, 2014, 3:13 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Nar­cis­sis­tic Contrarianism

  That’s a much broader (and vaguer) class.

• HalMorrisNov 21, 2014, 3:11 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Nar­cis­sis­tic Contrarianism

  Ah, another irregular verb. I am a deep and original thinker, synthesising good ideas from multiple sources without regard to ideology.

  I’m going over the verbs trying to locate what you’re referring to as an irregular verb. Am I making a mistake? Does “irregular verb” have some metaphorical connotation I’m not aware of?

  You seem to follow with 3 likely different interpretations of the same behavior. If I understand it correctly, that is kind of interesting, I’ll warrant

  I am deeply suspicious when people try to explain away their opponents’ beliefs, rather than defeat them intellectually

  So you have a criteria for being skeptical of (I won’t say “explaining away”, which would be presumptuous) my arguments having to do with the style of my argument rather than its content. That is good—I think we all should have such criteria, unless we plan to intellectually take apart all of the thousands upon thousands of assertions that cross our paths.

  I have been proposing one such. You just proposed another, one which is generally pretty good.

  Once you criticize something as “to explain away” most of what else you say is apt to be redundant.

• HalMorrisNov 21, 2014, 4:11 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  Thanks for a good humored response.

  Yeah, awesome is one that gets me.

• HalMorrisNov 21, 2014, 1:19 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  That was impressively opaque.

  By the way, is it really “bog-standard”? I thought it was “hog-standard”.

• HalMorrisNov 21, 2014, 1:00 AM

  5 points

  in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Nar­cis­sis­tic Contrarianism

  Well, now I feel bludgeoned. To refer to your judgement or theory about what is going on with me as simply “seeing”, and embed it in a subordinate clause is an old rhetorical trick, which I think we should avoid here.

  But really, I am very interested in the problem of knowing (and somehow having that knowledge be transmittable) who it is profitable to listen to, and who will lead one astray, because I see a breakdown of common sense about this in the face of the profusion of “information” sources we have these days. This concern started when I began to get forwarded emails from my mother with proofs that Obama is a Muslim and that sort of thing. I worry that we may be going from a mediocre order of things, like the days of 3 major TV channels, where there is a hell of a lot going on that we don’t get (but we’re not apt to get all that excited and be stampeded over a cliff like the Germans were in the 1930s) to something worse than mediocre.

• HalMorrisNov 21, 2014, 12:41 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: bogus’s comment on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  When you call it the “Brahmin class” dismissing it becomes redundant.

  I think we need institutions though, in which the “marketplace of ideas” isn’t just the marketplace. Lesswrong is one of them, as are universities.

  I believe that the rules of the game in academic research can be very productive as long as there is a there there. I tried to model this as “discovering natural machines”, which is what I think Newton did, or “Finding your Invisible Elephant”—if the blind men actually have an elephant then they may be able to map it if they go about it the right way. But if they have no elephant—one is hugging a tree trunk, another has hold of a snake and another is pushing on a wall—no amount of “scientific method” will help them find the nonexistent elephant. This is why I think some disciplines, like literary criticism and some branches of sociology, despite having peer-reviewed journals and all that, simply go round in circles, and lead to distrust of others, which have something to offer.

Nar­cis­sis­tic Contrarianism

• HalMorrisNov 20, 2014, 11:41 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  I don’t rate it highly; it’s just that it’s typical of what I notice a concerted chorus of people saying insistently, and I can see that it has an effect on public opinion—mostly it reinforces general distrust of “intellectual elites”). Maybe I shouldn’t have used that link at all—anyway, it seems to be detracting some attention from the questions I was asking.

• HalMorrisNov 20, 2014, 10:54 PM

  3 points

  on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  Actually, I hope someone else will respond to the original question of ‘what’s been your recent experience’, and we don’t get totally bogged down in “micro-debates”

• HalMorrisNov 20, 2014, 10:47 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: bogus’s comment on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  That’s a bit snarky, but yes, “correct style” may be arbitrary, but without it, we’d drift towards not being able to understand each other. All told, I think a professor (esp. in a thesis writing prep class) is expected to correct students’ grammar, and this one was treated shabbily.

• HalMorrisNov 20, 2014, 10:30 PM

  13 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  No contradiction there, in my opinion.

• HalMorrisNov 20, 2014, 10:30 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: bogus’s comment on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  personal strategies for being more resilient and assertive in the face of perceived slights

  I totally agree that we need that.

• HalMorrisNov 20, 2014, 10:24 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: falenas108’s comment on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  I think you’re right that a lot of par for the course friction between groups is being cherry-picked and made to look like a broad trend, when it isn’t nearly so broad if it is anything.

  There’s a lot of cherry picking, and a lot of making up out of whole cloth.

  An example of the latter: http://​​therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/​​2014/​​07/​​myths-about-saul-alinsky-and-obama.html with an addendum: http://​​therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/​​2014/​​08/​​what-did-saul-alinsky-really-say.html

  Note that the mythical “8 levels” were so well established, in a way, that Yahoo is even now, spitting it out matter of factly, 3 months after I wrote my piece. I just tried it (entering: What are the 8 levels of control as outlined by Saul Alinsky?) to answers.yahoo.com

  And yet, I warrant very few people have any idea that it’s going around, unless they spend quite a bit of time on right wing web sites—and read the comments, because the site’s main author(s) -- at least on the more important blogs, won’t be caught telling such flat-out lies.

• HalMorrisNov 20, 2014, 9:53 PM

  6 points

  in reply to: bogus’s comment on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  I’m 62 and have seen a lot, but what falenas108 describes sounds kind of horrific to me. Also I don’t see “cherry picking” in part because he/​she’s just giving a couple of points of data, not using a couple of points of data to draw broad conclusions. If you haven’t looked at the link http://​​assets.feministing.com/​​wp-content/​​uploads/​​2014/​​11/​​Screen-Shot-2014-11-19-at-10.26.55-AM.png I suggest you do. It seems to me many people’s fears and rages are being played on, and many people find themselves agreeable “echo chambers” where they goad each other into ever more extreme views. I remember in the 1970s working (as a nurses aid in a state mental hospital) with a guy who was as sure as he was of anything that the Moon Landing was a hoax (note—a fellow employee, not a patient) and that seemed pretty remarkable back then, but it seems pretty ordinary now.

• HalMorrisNov 20, 2014, 9:28 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: falenas108’s comment on: Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

  Thanks, a very interesting response. But what do you mean by “SJ” types? Actually the whole sentence “This article is construing actions taken to be issues SJ types are complaining about to be ones that are not serious or concerning” is a bit hard to parse though I think I understand all but “SJ types”.

Ir­ra­tional­ism on Cam­pus?

• HalMorrisNov 5, 2014, 11:30 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Elo’s comment on: pre­dic­tion and ca­pac­ity to represent

  Sometimes a black box approach works, sometimes not. Through neuroscience we are learning many things about how the mind works, and the varieties of human minds that the old black box behaviorist approach never came close to. In the stock market, technical investors (vs the Warren Buffet types) are the black boxers. Sometimes they are going along very nicely when they encounter a big exception to what they think they know and their strategy crashes. Ideally we’d like to know the structure of a thing, but black box analysis can play a big role when the thing is for some reason opaque.